Drawing Hearts in the Sand
by Skylark Evanson
Summary: My first shot at anything relatively Ilanca-y. Hope you enjoy it!


**A/N: I'm kind of in the process of working and such. But I don't know what I want to write… Alright, I've got it. This was in my head earlier and I love it. So you will read it now because you know you want to. Ilana's POV.**

**Disclaimer: I own nothing at all.**

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Jason had just run off for a few minutes. The party was in full swing, the whole beach rocking with the energy of it. The music was so loud that I could feel it pulsing through the grains of sand that created the shoreline. It was crazy. I wasn't sure how Lance was dealing with it, but he was managing to keep an eye on me while at a party that was totally packed with people.

Something was bothering me though. I had no clue what it was. There was just a dark, haunting feeling that nagged at my heart, tugging on it in one direction while my head was headed in another.

Maybe it was because I had been a monster less than two days ago. It was still awkward around Lance sometimes. Newton was fine with everything. Not like it mattered to him. But I did try to kill them...

"What are you drawing?" asked Newton as he came up behind me.

I looked over my shoulder at him I was surprised to see that Kimmy wasn't in tow. Her lithe form was instead in a swarm of people, each one of them laughing at something that was apparently funny. "Huh?" I asked, pulling myself out of my daydreams and deepest thoughts.

"What are you drawing?" he asked once more, this time pointing past me to the sand I had just been staring at with my knees tucked to my chest.

I wasn't aware that I had been drawing anything. I turned and looked and found a massive heart drawn into the wet sand that was at my feet as the tide rushed out once more just a few yards ahead of me. "I… I don't know," I said, knowing that the shape was definitely of a heart.

"Thinking of someone?" he asked as if he could read my mind. He stared at the image just as the watery waves lapped up at my feet and dragged it away into the swirling darkness that reflected the light of the glowing full moon.

"Maybe," I answered quietly, hoping that Jason wasn't close. Because who had been on my mind? Lance. And maybe Simon. Which was weird. And I wasn't thinking of Jason. That scared me the most.

"NEWTON!" came Kimmy's cry, holding a bright red cup up into the air as her beloved posse began to dance, shaking their butts about as much as the head cheerleader did on a daily basis.

The robot behind me was quiet for a long moment. The last thing I heard from him was his quiet footsteps heading away from me back into the life of the party. For some reason, a robot had a better social life than I did. It scared me a little bit.

The heart I had etched into the sand scared me more. My thoughts had been stuck on Lance for a while. I had thought of him and I and some of the past events. He was my guardian and he had seen me naked recently and that scared me more than almost anything else. I was so afraid that maybe I had drawn a heart in the sand because I had fallen in love with him.

That was horrifying.

"I'm back," came the soft voice of Jason as he plopped into the sand right beside me. "What'd I miss? I saw Newton walking away…"

"Nothing." I rubbed my shoe-clad foot over the last remnants of the heart that had once been etched into the tan flecks of gray that made up the beach. "He was just telling me that Lance was getting antsy…"

One of Jason's eyebrows arched. "Really?" he asked as if Newton's theoretical words made him question my ability to tell him the honest truth. "Because I passed Lance before I came back and he was pinning a girl to a tree. I'm pretty sure they were making out…"

Something inside of me seemed to snap at that. I felt like my heart had just shattered. It felt like a flame had just began to crawl its way into my chest, the anger welling up in me faster than I could suppress it. "He was what?"

"Well, it looked like they were. I mean, I wouldn't know, but it seemed like it. He had one arm around her and everything…" Jason's words seemed to trail off after that. I couldn't tell whether I had just been unable to hear him due to my growing rage or because he had just stopped talking in the first place.

"I need to talk to my brother," I said, trying to keep it cool that I was for some reason mad at Lance. I didn't even know why I suddenly felt like I had to hate him. I just did. I wanted his head on a silver platter.

"O-Okay," said Jason, just letting me go as he remained on the beach this time. His eyes stared out at the ocean with a certain dreaminess in them as I stormed off to see if what he had said was true.

Sure enough, Lance had a dark-haired girl with an excessive amount of black and gray make-up on pinned against a tree as his lips mashed against hers. It didn't seem like she wanted to fight back. And for some reason, he actually seemed happy. It was like this was the life he had lost after he had lost his father and that last bit of childhood he had once possessed.

I stormed back to Jason, barely calming myself down enough so that I didn't look furious as I returned to him. The image of the heart in the sand that I had drawn earlier was entirely gone now as I figure it had been earlier.

"Hey," he greeted me, that dorky little smile on his face making me return the emotion.

And I told myself that that heart was for Simon or Jason. Because I didn't care about Lance. I never had, never would. Because denial is the best way to deal with any situation. I had to deal with the pain of losing the guy I considered to be more than a brother and more than a best friend. To some goth.

But that was Lance.

"Hey," I said back to Jason, sitting down in the sand again on where the heart had once been.

And I am Ilana.

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**A/N: I just liked this one. It's my first shot at pure Ilanca. I hope you liked it. Please review!**

**~Sky**


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